Tomie
directed by Ataru Oikawa
starring Miho Kanno, Mami Nakamura
Arrow Video
Ataru Oikawa’s Tomie (1998) is the first of nine feature films based on the Junji Ito manga character, Tomie Kawakami. Although outlandish in concept, the story of this teenaged girl who is repeatedly murdered by men who desire her, only to keep being reborn, is often more tragic than one might expect from a horror movie based on a comic book. Making its long awaited debut on Blu-ray outside of Japan, Tomie looks beautiful, and this limited-edition disc will make new and old fans fall in love.
The film opens with a harried young man carrying a heavy shopping bag through the streets. He stops to check his parcel, which contains a smaller plastic grocery bag. Upon inspection, he sees the bag has torn, and through the slit, the eye of a young woman is looking back at him — an eye with a small beauty mark underneath. The bag contains the head of Tomie Kawakami, a teenaged girl who was murdered and dismembered by her school boyfriend, and who is now in the process of regrowing her body. This requires her to rapidly grow from just her hair, into a head and eventual body, which then matures into its final form of a 17-year-old girl whom men cannot control their desire for, nor control their need to kill and destroy her. This cycle has repeated countless times for Tomie. Her beauty is her weapon and her curse, and she only exists to destroy and be destroyed over and over again.
Tomie’s latest rebirth finds her living downstairs from photography student Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura), who is struggling to recover lost memories from her teenage years. Tomie (Miho Kanno) in her full human form sets her sights on seducing Tsukiko’s boyfriend, Yuuichi, and gets a job at the restaurant where he works, which causes the entire staff to start to turn on each other in their desire to possess Tomie. There is also a detective investigating the inexplicable disappearances of girls named Tomie Kawakami, the last of which was a classmate of our heroine Tsukiko, who must now face her fears and her murdered best friend, Tomie.
As an adaptation of the manga series, Tomie varies quite a bit from the source material, and some of that is by design. From a practical standpoint, there just wasn’t budget for the elaborate body horror effects that would be required. Creatively, Junji Ito encouraged adaptations of Tomie to go their own way with the character, as she is more of a concept than an actual character, an idea buttressed by having different actresses portray her in each film iteration. Most of the mechanics of the film are pretty basic J-Horror tropes, but the tragic inevitability and sadness in Tomie’s fate help them stand out. The push-pull of emotions toward the character, who is so sad and so evil, is fascinating both in print and on screen, and director Ataru Oikawa captures that tension wonderfully.
Arrow Video’s new Blu-ray boasts a loaded disc featuring interviews with actress Mami Nakamura, director Ataru Oikawa, and producer Mikihiko Hirata. The disc also has a rollicking audio commentary from Amber T., who, with this and her work on Arrow’s recent J-Horror Rising, is establishing herself as an essential voice in horror.
